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Tony Maclennan writes to tell us that there were many mixed feelings at this year's Microsoft Security Response and Safety Summit. Many who attended the conference felt that the presentations were sadly lacking in the technical details that were shared in previous years. With Microsoft entering the arena as a competitor to these anti-virus companies, one has to wonder about the effect on the free flow of information that ultimately benefits the consumer.

Has anyone in the DOJ looked into this Microsoft anti-spyware anti-virus bit?Anyone else feel this is the epitomy of anti-competative practices? Hell their OS is the REASON these other companies exist, and now Microsoft gets to profit from thier own security holes?

Someone else HAS to see the flaw in this idea... I can only pray the EU once again has more sense than the DOJ.

Anti-trust? We're talking about Microsoft, the epitome of anti-trust. They don't trust me to own a legal copy of Windows XP (I change all my hardware enough it accuses me of pirating it), and I don't trust them with my computer.

It's only a monopoly if you don't have other real choices. That may have been true 10 years ago, but nowadays mac and linux look like perfectly viable alternatives. Are you claiming that these other options are so inferior to Windows that they don't count? (posted from a powerbook G4)

On the contrary, they very much count (posting from a mac mini because it fits on my desk and all my real work is on servers I ssh to anyway) and I whole heartedly support them. I just find it a bit odd that a -convicted- (in more than one court mind you) monopoly would be allow to do this.

Of course a lot of the things comming out of the U.S. government boggle me lately.At least the EU will back it's conviction, says more for them than I can say about Bushy boy.

Says who? You? You are incorrect, sir. One way in which the governement established that Microsoft is a monopoly is in the fact that they can charge different people/companies different prices for Windows. Google it if you wish.

Microsoft still controls enough of the market that they can bully companies like DEL into NOT shipping Linux to home users except under extreme duress, and NOT shipping a box without Windows (or shipping a box without windows for more than the same box with Windows), and making it impossible for you to return the OS if you don't accept the license agreement without also returnin

MS were quite clever to get DOJ all hot under the collar about Netscape & IE. These are no longer competitive areas. What is more important is that DOJ monitors future manuipulations by MS. For example, how they are playing in mobile space, how they're playing in personal audio (will their new audio device kill iPod through fair means or foul?) and things like anti-virus products.

For MS's point of view, being able to lock up the anti-virus APIs makes more than just business sense. It also allows them to shut the door on (limited) review of their system by citing some lame excuses like "there is no valid reason for anyone to look at these interfaces, anywone doing so is probably a terrorist!". Loss of that (limited) review would be a bad thing for the industry.

Offering someone protection for a fee when you're part of the danger to that person means that you're running a protection racket. For a fee, MS offers to close the holes which it leaves in its operating system. I think that you see this kind of scheme at work all over the computer industry. The pushing of upgrades of software and hardware as a fix against problems is of a similar nature.

That's dumb and would never fly in a court of law. The danger to people comes from the freaking criminals who write the viruses - NOT from Windows! Given how trivial it is to install adware as root on a modern Linux box the words rocks" and "glass houses" come to mind.

(consider all the Firefox exploits that have been discovered, most users don't install updates themselves, kernel exploits come out all the time etc...)

The security companies will be better off forming their own knowledge pool and inviting Microsoft representatives to learn from them.

What's ours is ours and what's yours is ours, right? What a flamebait assertion, that M$ should keep the details of how they do things to themselves but that others should go out of their way to share what they manage to claw from the void. Typical.

M$'s behavior and the results are entirely predictable by this point. They want to own the market so they are withholding

I didn't mean it as flame bait. I simply don't think MS is a totally reliable, un-biased source of information about the quality of security within their OS, and I don't think the independent security product manufacturers should put themselves in position where they are dependent on MS for information on OS behavior that represents a security vulnerability. I also don't think they should belong to an organization or consortium that is controlled by MS, because MS has conflicts of interest between presentin

If Microsoft releases the buggy, hole-ridden mess that so many are afraid of along with functional, cheap, easily obtainable antivirus tools, they're out of a job. If Microsoft were to release an OS as secure as, say, Linux, they're still out of a job.

The second options is impossible for a closed source company.

The first option, less most of the bugs, is what M$ would like you to believe is going to happen.

The usual option is to realease anything they can and then put the others out of business. Pr

6. APIs....going forward, Microsoft will ensure that all the interfaces within Windows called by any other Microsoft product, such as the Microsoft Office system or Windows Live(TM), will be disclosed for use by the developer community generally. That means that anything that Microsoft's products can do in terms of how they plug into Windows, competing products will be able to do as well.

It's especially a concern that Microsoft requires attendees to sign a document that allows the company to use anything that anyone says at the event.

"Having been put into that situation, people will feel more inhibited to say things," said Jimmy Kuo, a McAfee fellow and a veteran of the Microsoft events. "They ask us to sign a nondisclosure agreement, and if we say anything in those meetings that Microsoft is able to use, they have the right to do so." The agreement was introduced in recent years, he said.

Really, what kind of conference organized by a competitor that already puts in a clause that they can steal the ideas presented would actually render useful information? Think of some big pharmaceutical firm letting its competitors come and show their ideas with a clause like the one above. It would be surprising if anyone would actually show up.

Microsoft would be irresponsible if they did not include a clause in the agreement giving them rights to use anything disclosed at the conference.

Imagine Microsoft was busy working on feature X. Then, along comes someone from Symantec who talks about feature X at the conference. Later, Microsoft comes out with an update to their product incorporating feature X. Symantec cries fowl and starts complaining about how Microsoft stole their confidential information.

All the clause effectively says is that the information disclosed at the conference is not confidential. If it's not a trade secret, Microsoft can use it as it sees fit anyway. The same would hold true for anyone else at the conference. The agreement just puts it down in plain English for those not up on IP law.

MS think they are allowed to incorporate any feedback, anyone gives them.What is worse, many of their NDAs imply that if you suggest something to them, you give them the rights to use any of your IP (i.e evil softwre patents) in the process. Thus they care enough about software patent infringement to want to get the rights to other peoples intellectual property, while still pushing the EU campaign to make software patents legal.

When we talk to the great satan of the Pacific North West, we mustnt ever make s

Another session discussed how malicious software could leave traces on Vista PCs even after it is removed, McAfee's Kuo said. The trace is in the form of a so-called symbolic link, a technology introduced in Vista. These are designed to make it easier to locate items on a computer, and are somewhat similar to current shortcuts in Windows XP and aliases in Mac OS systems.

"Symbolic links can clutter up your machine with lots and lots of links that point nowhere" after the malicious software is removed, Kuo said. Protective tools will probably end up doing the clean-up, he said. It's a sign that on Vista systems, security software has more work to do than on earlier versions of the operating system.

This new symbolic link technology sounds like serious stuff. I hope they hold back on the release date until they it's working correctly.

yo man, have you ever removed a symbolic link to a directory in *nix and then forgot to not put the/-sign after it?(*) There goes your original directory! These symbolic links have been a pain in the ass for *nix users for decades already.

(*) or was it the other way around? Just confusing everybody here to make things worse;)

There is something very wrong if an entire business exists to work around holes in a companies OS. There is something even more wrong when that company is attempting to enter into that business. Wouldn't fixing the security model be more effective.

So hands up who didn't see this coming more than a year ago when they started talking about it...Don't forget this is still Microsoft we are talking about - the upper management is still in place which means the ethos while hidden hasn't changed - maybe when gates and the others go it might improve though not before then.

1. Installation of any software. Computer manufacturers and customers are free to add any software to PCs that run Windows. ..

As long as customers are free to add any software to PCs that run Windows, they can inadvertently install software that's a virus, trojan, or other malware. Faced with the option to either lock down Windows so you can't install anything that's not pre-approved (like many cell phones and other devices), which would go a long ways toward fixing t

We all should just unplug our ethernet cables right now, I have the feeling that with MS entering the market with antivirus software that less information will get out about how to fix things. Now when MS screws with their antivirus and Windows it will take longer to get things to work right because who would wanna use MS's bloatware antivirus.

Microsofts poor security and anti-virus is what keeps bills paid for me and a lot of people I know. If you ask me, malware can be a good thing in a capitalist run country like USA. If it wasn't for malware, the entry level jobs at a lot of IT companies would be gone.

Exactly. And if it wasn't for microsoft people would all be expecting the software you right for them to work, everytime. As it stands now they just shrug off the worst of bugs as probably a 'windows thing'.

fairness and microsoft go together like Military and intelligence. Of course they don't want to talk about how they will patch the gaping holes they leave in their software. And you knew sooner or later someone there would go, hey, why don't WE sell spyware and antivirus software? It's all just foolishness. Microsoft is, has been, and will be, a corrupt monopoly as long as our corrupt government allows it.

But I went to the Chicago one this year, and it was utterly useless. All it came across to me was an extended sales pitch for their products. Perhaps I should have expected more, but it really didn't get in to any real technical details. You just went to some room and some half-techie guy talked about a specific product. It would have been a lot more useful if they'd discussed real issues, etc.

I really wish that Microsoft disappeared from the OS market for just a short time. Not one computer running Windows (or perhaps at most a niche market with roughly 5% share). Then suddenly Windows won't have security holes. Then it will be Linux, MacOS, or whatever happens to control the lion's share of the market, which will be plagued by security grief.

Of course those would likely get blamed on "Evil Hackers and Coders" as opposed to the company(pluralize if necessary) putting out the OS.

SpyBot and AdWare are free, so why would they care if Microsoft bundled anti-spyware with windows? It's not like they're being denied revenue.The fact is, the overwhelming majority of users don't have any anti-spyware protection, and Microsoft is tired of getting blamed for this (note that spyware doesn't generally rely on OS flaws, but on users explicitly installing malware). In order to clamp down on spyware, it's necessary for anti-spyware to be bundled, since most are not installing 3rd party anti-spy

Anti-virus, anti-spyware, etc. costs money to produce.Microsoft can develop their products and recover their development costs by adding it onto the cost of the Windows operating system, which everyone is forced to pay anyway, whether or not they download the free product. Every other company has to market their product with their own money and there is no guarantee that they will get that money back.

Even if Microsoft's anti-spyware were made into a separate download, every Windows customer is paying for it

I sat in a meeting yesterday with "developers" who had never heard of Bachus-Naur form. I routinely confer with "programmers" who have never heard of a finite state machine. I work daily with "data architects" who have never heard of Dr. Codd or of normalization. I am personally acquainted with upper managers who are just dying to replace OpenBSD-based firewalls with M$ Vista Server. THIS, my fellow cognoscenti, is the extent to which our society is infested with charlatans and ignorami.
That M$ can now, on the one hand, generate security holes of arbitrary obscurity, and, on the other, miraculously detect and repair them far and away better than their erstwhile "competitors" is a final and apocalyptic testimonial to the supreme stupidity (I use the word advisedly, in the sense of "willful ignorance") of our omnipotent layers of corporate management.
Wasn't it bad enough when M$ were the sole possessors of the Most Sacred A[PB]Is? Wasn't it awful enough that they were able to ignore even the most rudimentary dictates of software engineering with impugnity -- that the drooling imbeciles in management would keep right on paying vast sums of money for hideous deformities of Logic without batting an eyelash? Do they now get to rake in huge profits from "repairing" systemic defects of their own intentional manufacture?
I am 41. I am tired and old. I have watched, like a Felliniesque "Sad Clown of Life," wave upon wave of utter inanity wash up on the vast, dead-whale-stinking beach of corporate and academic IT. I have seen too much. I can cry no more. I want to know how to stop caring now. How, for the love of God, do I join the endless ranks of these gibbering fools who never think one picometer beyond their golf handicaps? How, for the bleeding love of the pumping, pulsating heart of Jesus Christ on a pogo stick do I just sit in meetings daydreaming about jumping into my big yellow H2 and driving back to my prefab McMansion in the burb-sprawl and staining my redwood deck with Johnson's WaterSeal? Why oh why must I KNOW that the imminent deaths of such elegancies as Tru64 Unix and MIPS and Alpha are a sin against art and science and technology and Man? Can't I just be stupid too? What's so wrong with me? What have I done? Why must I suffer so?
One day, my friends, we will all lounge in paradise happily signing off on million-dollar purchases of Microsoft AntiVirus Protection(TM) with huge idiotic grins upon our faces and lovely oblivious strings of rancid drool dangling from our chins. We will not be tormented by the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Our eyes will bear the brilliant, unfocused glow of perfect, orgasmic stupidity. Until then, we must work to balance our egregious karma. Can there be any doubt whatever that we fried and devoured living human babies in each of our wretched previous incarnations? What more glaring evidence can there be of our complete, total, and inherent evil?
We sinners must needs endure the terrible, sadistic wrath of a cold and childish god. May he soon tire of so gleefully tormenting us. Amen.
Railgun Sally

> I sat in a meeting yesterday with "developers" who had never heard of Bachus-Naur form. I routinely confer with "programmers" who have never heard of a finite state machine. I work daily with "data architects" who have never heard of Dr. Codd or of normalization. [...] THIS, my fellow cognoscenti, is the extent to which our society is infested with charlatans and ignorami.

Ignorami is a variant of the ancient Japanese art of paper folding. (Ignorami practitioners have been known to leave their creations on sidewalks creating serious public safety issues.)

Charlatans are a salamander-like creature that can originally be found on the Galapagos islands, but who are now becoming a problem in urban areas because of specimens escaping from zoos. (Hence society being infested with them.)

"Ship of Fools [wikipedia.org]",
Sebastian Brandt, Das Narrenschyff, Basel: de Olpe,1494
featuring caricatures of Albrecht Dürer.
one of the most popular early books printed after Gutemberg invented printed.

I sat in a meeting yesterday with "developers" who had never heard of Bachus-Naur form. I routinely confer with "programmers" who have never heard of a finite state machine. I work daily with "data architects" who have never heard of Dr. Codd or of normalization

You think that's bad? I just read a five hundred and thirty three word slashdot post by someone who's never heard of paragraphs.

You know what's worse? Someone that actually counted the words in a five hundred and thirty three word post.

Besides, it was a rant, one of the most intelligently-composed rants I've yet read on Slashdot, and I fully believe that one so obviously literate as RailGunSally could certainly have inserted appropriate paragraph breaks had she chose. However, not using paragraphs lends a certain intense stream-of-consciousness aspect to a good rant.

I sat in a meeting yesterday with "developers" who had never heard of Bachus-Naur form. I routinely confer with "programmers" who have never heard of a finite state machine. I work daily with "data architects" who have never heard of Dr. Codd or of normalization. I am personally acquainted with upper managers who are just dying to replace OpenBSD-based firewalls with M$ Vista Server. THIS, my fellow cognoscenti, is the extent to which our society is infested with charlatans and ignorami.

I work at a university, and I've talked to some people there about MS going into the AV business. What amazed me was that there were some people who find this a Good Thing. Even people who are considered extremely smart and routinely publish highly technical papers in established journals can be mindbogglingly stupid.

The problem as I see it, is the ones who want to get far in a company, are not the same people who should be making decisions. Part of the problem is smart people who want to keep doing what they enjoy doing - engineering, rather than making the transition to managers. This is nobodys fault per se, but this is were the problem lies.

A small point; differences times, different curriculums. Don't mistake this for incompetence. Actually having compared curriculums with my uncles, whom two of also have masters degrees in computer science, I can certainly say we're not learning less. Atleast here in Norway, we're learning different skills, and todays education is broader... but not easier!

While never having heard of data-normalization is pretty bad, state-machines are hardly important (they're good for giving the students fun puzzles on t

What the Bachus-Naur form is, I have no idea. I can with relative certainty say that it wasn't in any of the books on my curriculum during my 5 years of university. I just finished, and I read pretty much everything cover-to-cover regrardless of how little of the book we were supposed to read (and it's not on wikipedia, which means it doesn't exist).

I have seen too much. I can cry no more. I want to know how to stop caring now. How, for the love of God, do I join the endless ranks of these gibbering fools who never think one picometer beyond their golf handicaps?

And that is Microsoft, the sickest of them all. They are 80-95% of the whole industry alone, and everything else have to rotate around them.And they soon have a new OS to sell..As usual this OS is incomplete and a mess:The event mostly provided a primer on security in Windows Vista, which led to a discussion on how attendees' products might work with the Windows XP successor. ...Ugh! Still not sorted out...

"Symbolic links can clutter up your machine with lots and lots of links that point nowhere" after th

... but you also have to look at the possibility that no one would know the inherent flaws in Windows better than Microsoft, and thusly, no one would be better able to create anti-malware software. Sure, it might press competitors out of business, and that's inherently bad, but if it could provide us with a single anti-malware solution that was self-sustaining and beat all the bad stuff out there, I would be quite happy with MS.

In the short term there is no profit. Think about next year when all the businesses that are still running Win2k, (close to 60% at last count) still refuse to switch due to security concerns, there was never a valid reason to switch to XP and there won't be one for Vista. Where is the profit in never getting your customers to upgrade because the new software is worse than the patched up old stuff? When this group needs something new they are looking at other OS's that don't have M$ unending security problem

Kronos was the ruler of the elder gods in Greek religion. He had a habit of swallowing his children whole because it had been predicted that one of them would overthrow him. The anti-malware companies are the children of Microsoft. Is it really surprising that they would rather not be eaten?

> Kronos was the ruler of the elder gods in Greek religion. He had a habit of swallowing his children whole because it had been predicted that one of them would overthrow him. The anti-malware companies are the children of Microsoft. Is it really surprising that they would rather not be eaten?

Before Microsoft jumped into the antivirus/spyware game, everything was okay, because although there were major security issues with Windows, other businesses jumped up to fill the gap and fix the problems. Life went on, and nobody got hurt (except the consumer, paying their $39.99 a year).

Now that Microsoft is in the game, they threaten to destroy these other businesses that were covering-ass before, and screw the consumer even more with price hikes once they dominate the market, but it's not less-right

I spent an evening last month purging my sister's box of spyware, dial up trojans and other junk.she was running Macafee, everything turned on, all these 'sign on to the internet' dialogs cropping up, etc. None of it worked; it just made the machine really slow to start up.

She asked whether she should renew her subscription. I asked her what was the point and sent her towards f-secure, that do at least view sony rootkits as evil.

The whole windows security business is a tax on people who believe that paying

Oh please. I was at that conference, and the only thing that decreased the level of technical content was the fact that the conference content is now spread across three or so areas, some of which are attended by a majority of non-technical business types.

If you think about it, Microsoft has good reason to keenly share the security details of Vista, etc. - with trusted industry people, of course. Not only do they want to crow about all the cool stuff they're building, but it can only help improve the imag

If MS makes money out of their security products - ppl say they are anti-competitive
If MS makes their security products free - ppl say they are using their OS monopoly to kill the (windows specific) security companies.
Solution: Fix the holes in OS instead of offering spyware/anti-virus tools for free/money.

BUT...let's be realistic. The odds that MS is going to be able to create a 109% (or close to it) operating system are very low. A lot of that is their fault, but some of it isn't. Windows is a huge target, and ANY holes will almost ALWAYS be found. That's just how it is. Nothing humans make is perfect, and every lock can be picked.

That being the case, why shouldn't they be allowed to include anti-virus and anti-malware functions with Windows? They're an extra layer of protection. And, honestly

Apparently, the attendees were also required to sign a (non)disclosure agreement that limited what they could do with the information they got from the meeting, and that allowed Microsoft to do whatever they wanted with what attendees said.

Not that it is "worse" by design than any competing AV kits. It just simply cannot work. The reason is that AV kits are not "fighting" against computer bugs, they're fighting humans. And (some) humans are by definition (still) smarter than any program.You can see it at the MS Firewall kit. Now, it was maybe convenient to configure the firewall through the Registry, something anyone with Admin access (=The Average Windows User) can change with API calls, but exactly this flaw makes it useless. The VERY FIRST

You imply that the GP posters spelling is substandard, however I would contend that it is perfectly acceptable. From the dictionary definitions quoted below, clearly by "evet terrists" he was talking about extremist newt activists.

Evet (n.)[See Eft, n.](Zoöl.) The common newt or eft. In America often applied to several species of aquatic salamanders. [Written also evat.]

Terrist (n.)A neologism referring to environmentalists who engage in actions considered by some to be terrorism, (eco-terrorism) including destruction of property as well as various types of nonviolent direct action. It is also a moniker used by individuals who concern themselves with the world (Terra) that is the home of the human species (Homo sapiens).

If they gave technical details they might be used by h4x0rz or evet terrists!

More like Financial or Market Security Through Obscurity. Like every other market, Microsoft wants a cut of it and to assert their will upon the rules by which it runs. It's utter madness, however, because if Microsoft did their work right the first time this market would be considerably smaller and segements wouldn't exist at all!

That Microsoft seeks to profit from protecting customers from the holes in their software is l

This has been endlessly rehashed on/. but I'll make the point again. No desktop operating system is secure enough to be safe from its most dangerous threat - Mom. Mom is a dangerous threat, clicking links without a care in the world, running programs that offer free kittens on her desktop, opening that email attachment containing a forward of Grandma's Secret Recipe for Jello Pies, and so on. The best defense a poor OS has against Mom is additional software that will keep up with everything going on via in

Windows 3.1 and DOS 6, DOS 6.22 for sure. If I remember correctly, it could identify viruses but not remove them. It did identify the "Michaelangelo" virus, back in the days of the sneaker-net. However, it was generally suggested that you get a real anti-virus program.